Pierre Huyghe announced as recipient of 2017 Nasher Prize
Now in its second year, the Nasher Prize was established to honor a living artist who enhances the medium of sculpture and its cultural significance. French artist Pierre Huyghe has been designated for the 2017 prize.
The Nasher Prize is awarded through the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Conceived for the exhibition, study, and conservation of modern and contemporary sculpture, the 2.4 acre site includes a 55,000 square-foot building designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano and features more than 300 iconic pieces by Calder, de Kooning, Giacometti, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Rodin, and Serra, amongst others.
Pierre Huyghe was selected for the Nasher Prize by an international jury of museum directors, curators, artists, and art historians with expertise in the domain of sculpture. Jury members included Lynne Cooke (Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art), Okwui Enwezor (Director, Haus der Kunst), and Sir Nicholas Serota (Director, Tate).
Huyghe was born in 1962 in Paris, and pursued his studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in his native city. Today he lives and works between Chile and New York. In 2013, he had a retrospective at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which traveled thereafter to Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2014) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014-2015). He has had numerous international solo exhibitions at such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2015) and the Tate Modern in London (2006).
He deploys an unconventional variety of materials and disciplines — music, cinema, dance, and theater mingle with biology and philosophy, incorporating elements as diverse as fog, ice, computer programs, video games, dogs, bees, and microorganisms.
He has vastly expanded the parameters of what sculpture can be and can symbolize. “I'm looking at the co-evolution of interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real or symbolic,” Huyghe said in a statement. He describes his approach as examining "different states of living, self-organizing in a dynamic and unstable situation: mesh, porous, contingent."
Huyghe will be presented with an award designed by Renzo Piano, the aforementioned architect of the Nasher Sculpture Center, at a ceremony in Dallas on April 1, 2017.
In conjunction with the Nasher Prize, the Nasher Sculpture Center annually presents a series of public programs exploring the evolving nature of contemporary sculpture. This year, Nasher Prize Dialogues will occur in Berlin, Mexico City, and Dallas, Texas.
